Wake-Up Call: Steer clear of this DMV office!

I've always had good luck at the Division of Motor Vehicles office at 2736 Welton Street. Sure, the tiny parking lot is a nightmare, but the DMV employees are friendly, if not always fast -- and you can always take a quick stroll around Five Points if there's a wait. Which I did on Friday afternoon, when the place was standing-room-only and the crowd overflowed into that nightmare parking lot and ran down to the Wells Fargo ATM -- who knew that if your dealer takes two months to send you registration forms, you're still the one who has to pay the $25-a-month late fee? But that's a story for another day.,

Because while I was away from the DMV office, another story -- or something -- had unfolded. "Yes, people, there's a very bad smell in here, and I think anyone who smells it knows what it is. Somebody did something somewhere," apologized the security guard, who'd been tracking the source of the stink and was now rushing to open windows and doors. "I apologize if any of you get cold, but it's better than sitting in this."

And because late on a Friday afternoon, after already investing an hour (or more) in a DMV wait, no one was about to surrender his seat -- even on this wild, shit-smell ride.

Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword, Denver’s News and Arts weekly, in 1977; she’s been the editor there ever since. She’s a regular on the weekly Colorado Public Television roundtable Colorado Inside Out, the former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies -- a post that got her an unexpected interview with former President Bill Clinton in front of a thousand people (while she was in flip-flops) -- and played a real journalist in John Sayles’s Silver City.